


Lumen ad revelationem gentium

by PerpetuaLilium



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Angie playing fast and loose with the Catholic liturgical calendar to suit my own artistic desires, Bisexual Howard stark, Bisexual Peggy Carter, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Catholic Character, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Gay or bisexual Bucky Barnes, Lesbian or bisexual Angie Martinelli, Peggy and Angie managing to beg out of work and crediting or blaming other people for it, Peggy no longer thinking of Howard as entirely on the level after the whole thing with Steve's blood, Peggy perhaps never having thought of Howard as entirely on the level in the first place, Religion, past steggy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-04 23:10:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4156521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerpetuaLilium/pseuds/PerpetuaLilium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Peggy goes looking for Angie one afternoon and finds her in church, she starts thinking about her own beliefs, purity of motive, what she looks for in Angie and looked for in Steve, and what she looks for in her own heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lumen ad revelationem gentium

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a conversion fic; it is not about Peggy finding something. It is about Peggy starting to look for something. What if anything she finds, I'm not sure I understand her well enough to claim to know.
> 
> The fic is set in 1947; the Feast of the Presentation fell on a Sunday. Season Two will probably consign my timeline to the dustbin of canon non-compliance. Right now I'm trying to work out if I change around certain lines to make it less awkward, since originally I was under the impression that in 1947 this was a weekday, so Peggy and Angie talk about missing work, and I just added a few phrases to explain why they'd be there on a Sunday, and I'm not sure if it made much sense...
> 
> Angie is praying a Feast of All Souls prayer on the Feast of the Presentation because the title of the fic comes from one of the readings for the Feast of the Presentation. I'm aware that the rationale that I have her give for this is somewhat transparent. There were a couple of different sides of Catholicism that I wanted to get across in a single scene, and this was my preferred solution.

The brightness of the day was muted in here, and red streamed out over Angie’s face. Her face was turned down, a little inward, her lips pursed, her eyes lidded heavily. The red came from a window showing the martyrdom of Saint Lawrence towards which her gaze was inclined; beneath the window was a font that was immediate and hieratic as a marble hand, a half-formed fist, reaching up with the water cupped in the palm. The expression on her face was not still; it wavered half-indistinctly, the pursed lips training upward or downward at their corners from moment to moment, the heavily lidded eyes going back and forth between half-open and fully closed.  
  
The overall effect was something more than and other than simply submissive. Something about the light from the Saint Lawrence window, in which the saint, making absolutely ridiculous gestures, fried on his brazier, might be transforming it. It might also be a genuinely deeper and more indeterminate type of expression, expressing a wavering and wistful consciousness, with which Peggy remained, she had to say, herself unfamiliar. On a wicked impulse she wanted to grab Angie by the shoulders and shake her until she could not but come up for air. On a kinder impulse she stayed and kept watch, sitting down two pews ahead and gazing dutifully up at the figures of the Evangelists over the altar, only occasionally glancing curiously and voyeuristically back over her shoulder. So it remained until the lips at last moved.  
  
_“…Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine…”_  
  
“Angie,” Peggy said. She said it so quietly as to not make obvious whether she was addressing another or speaking to herself. The wicked impulse wished to rouse Angie, and was ameliorated by a desire to speak to her about this. The kinder impulse wished to leave her be, and was poisoned by a desire to not have to deal with hearing about this.  
  
_“…Et lux perpetua luceat eis…”_  
  
“Angie,” Peggy said again. This time it was clear and clean, to herself. Her neck tensed. Something felt wrong, misfortunate, in the kink that had been in her shoulder since her work-out this morning. The stone eyes of Saint Matthew above the altar were particularly startling to her. She had no idea how to handle this. Nothing had ever given her a sense of how to deal with this. She trembled and knew with the dully final certainty of a correctly placed telephone call that there were sides of this world that Angie saw that she did not, that she, Peggy, was in this as in so many other things not actually the worldly-wise one.  
  
It was cold outside. Peggy did not want to flee back into that cold, especially since she had been out in it for so long looking for Angie after she had awoken to find her not in the mansion or at most of their usual haunts. Finally Salvatore Franco at the corner deli had told her that Angie had passed through and invited him to this church to say prayers for their loved ones in Purgatory. Peggy’s Latin was not what it had been in her schooldays, but it sounded very much to her like that was what Angie was doing right now. What remained to wonder was why now; All Souls’ Day was at the very end of the year, wasn’t it? And why at this moment—in the late afternoon on a day when Angie usually had work, a day when Peggy was only not at work because of complicated office politics that would tomorrow probably cease to obtain…?  
  
Hers was not really to question this, now, was it? It wasn’t her who could feel this. Saint Luke looked on more passionately than most, but more kindly. Peggy looked back over her shoulder, not at Angie, but at the rose window, framed in the thin spiky columns that supported the vaulted dark-blue ceiling. The rose window was mostly the same blue as the ceiling, and the lighter colors in it had the effect of stars.  
  
_“Angie!”_ Peggy found herself saying, once it seemed that Angie had finished with the prayer.  
  
Angie’s eyes flickered fully open. “English!” she said. “Hey, what are you doing here…?” She did not say this as if she was affronted. It was a very simple and innocent question from somebody whose defenses were limited to begin with and seemed to have gone down further since she had been in here.  
  
“Salvatore told me where to find you. I have to say, Angie, I’d not have taken you for the type to be so…” She paused, and tried to think in a fraction of a second how she wanted this sentence to continue. She shouldn’t say “religious”; it would be impolite, and was in any case not true as she had known that Angie was a churchgoer for quite some time. It wasn’t “feverish”; that was close to what she meant, but still not quite there, not quite an accurate way of putting the way Angie seemed to be, and might sound too much like an insult. It was hard. She wished she hadn’t said anything. She wished she had had the capacity for holy terror, so that she could have just fled the church. (She was too fearless; it was something Steve had loved about her, and Angie seemed starry-eyed about it, but sooner or later it caused everyone to fall.)  
  
“What is it?” asked Angie. She sounded like she was preparing to apologize. Peggy hated that, and hated that she had brought it on. The temptation existed to swear and bring her fist down against her thigh.  
  
“It surprises me a little to find you here on a day like this.” Pause. Another pause. Angie’s eyes flashed and flickered. Her lips curled up again. Peggy was relieved. Saint Matthew maintained his half-judgmental silence. “It’s a wonderfully crisp day. People are enjoying themselves outside. If you weren’t at work I’d have expected to find you ice-skating or something of the like. –I would have figured that you'd be here in the morning, but right now why _aren’t_ you at work? You do usually work Sunday afternoons, right?” She somewhat loathed this, but Monday was Angie's only day off, and she was lucky if she got one day off every few weeks; both of them were in such irregular types of positions...  
  
“I could ask the same of you since you do too.”  
  
“Office politics,” said Peggy.  
  
Angie raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Eventually what she said was “Makes sense, I guess.” She stood up. Her brown dress fluttered down around her. The lace veil on her head fluttered in the aftershock of her sudden movement. “I took a double shift tomorrow so I could get off today. I wanted to be here to…” She sighed and clasped her hands in front of her. “We’d always come here on All Souls’ Day in November,” she said.  
  
“November the second, yes,” said Peggy. “I’d ask if you come here on the second of every month, but I remember what we were doing last month, and…”  
  
“No, we just started coming on the Feast of the Presentation too,” said Angie. “Can’t remember why exactly—can’t’ve been more than six or seven. We’ve—I’m doing what we always did.”  
  
What there was to say to this Peggy couldn’t begin to comprehend. Her mind had penetrated into a vast region about which nobody had ever given any thought to teaching her. She was barely even conscious of what there was to hold her in wonder. She got up and went two pews back to stand next to Angie.  
  
“I’m a little envious,” she said.  
  
“Of what?”  
  
“It gets to be a little hard to maintain normal values and beliefs,” said Peggy, “when half of what you see around you every day is so sudden and new and marvelous and outside anything you had imagined.”  
  
“Are things really that…?…Oh. You meaning during the war.”  
  
“Not necessarily only during the war.”  
  
Angie sighed and shook her head. Her gaze was now trained on the altar, high and bedecked in crimson and gold, with _**IHS**_ written in blazing letters on the wood that supported it. “What _haven’t_ you done, English?” she asked. She sounded a little star-struck. Peggy had never really been sure what to make of that, even after she had learned to divine what Angie really meant by it. Even in so ad hoc a relationship as theirs there remained things hanging, drifting around, there in the air, there in the wilderness between them.  
  
“I have told you about Steve, right?” asked Peggy. She was not sure she should be saying this, but she had already started to say it so she guessed there was no use stopping.  
  
“Not much,” Angie said, “but a little bit. Yes.”  
  
“Steve was one of those people who could maintain values and beliefs,” said Peggy, “even when he himself was one of the sudden and new and marvelous things from outside. It was—it is part of what I love about him.”  
  
After a pause, Angie said, “You’re Betty Carver, aren’t you?”  
  
This was not a question Peggy had expected to come of this. She raised her eyebrows. She thought back to her schooldays again; young, skipping around festooned in the school’s red and white or her house’s green, being taught what she had always regarded as the great, the classic, the perennial moral lessons. To somebody like Angie, she owed the truth.  
  
“Yes,” she said, “I am.” Angie was silent for a moment, so Peggy added, without knowing where she hoped for the conversation to be able to go from here, “I admire you, Angie. You’re another one of those people.”  
  
Angie smiled. Peggy was filled with love for that bright body. She was not a Christian really, and nobody had made any particular effort to raise her as one, beyond having her sit through the bright and colorful services of Christmas and Easter and Founders’ Day. Yet there was an appeal to something about this, on a basis specific perhaps more to Angie than to anything about the Church that had her fealty, and somehow Peggy’s longed-for response to being here was to take Angie and kiss her and take grim and perverse pleasure in so doing in the view of all the saints. This was one of those temptations that it was probably best to ignore and tell to get behind her but it was hard, it was so hard, especially as Angie’s lips were slightly parted, her smile halfway amused, the way in which she was receiving the compliment more sportive than gracious. Peggy had told her who and what she herself was and extended praise to her from that puissant place within seconds. As long as her body and mind had strength she would remember this church as the place where she had so done.  
  
It was not as if Peggy could very well ask Angie out in the middle of a church—could she? Would she ask a man out in this situation? She didn’t think she would.  
  
“When it gets colder,” said Angie, softly, shyly, “do you wanna go ice skating down at Rockefeller?”  
  
Peggy grinned. She felt a sweet heat overwhelm the flesh of her cheeks. “I’d like nothing better,” she said.  
  
They sat in the church for a while longer. Peggy kept gazing up at that altarpiece and the Evangelists and kept wondering about the Power behind it all. She realized that she would be happy to come back here some time, and see what she could see at a proper service. It wouldn’t be doing what she always did, that was for sure, and she strongly doubted that she would feel about it the way Angie did. But even so why not? It might teach her something after all. Even if she didn’t know yet what it was that she had to learn.  
  
“Lord love ya, English,” said Angie. Peggy almost trusted that notion. It was a great notion. Some things were lovely enough to hope for even absent any real possibility of belief.  
  
“I’m sure,” said Peggy, who was distinctly and exceptionably unsure. She hoped she didn’t sound as if she was trying too hard to be diplomatic.  
  
“Lost in thought?” Angie asked.  
  
“It’s a little mysterious,” Peggy said, “and I’m not sure I can define or describe it. But I would like to come here again with you some time, if you think they’ll have me.”  
  
“If you think ‘they’ will have you? Who are ‘they’?”  
  
Peggy gestured at the saints.  
  
“They’ll have anybody.”  
  
“I feel that…there are importances and exigencies within me…” She wasn’t making sense. Her speech was entirely incoherent and unfair to Angie. “I’m not sure I’m right for it.”  
  
“But maybe it’s right for you.” Angie stopped short, then added, with the bravery of a sailor before the mast as the ship cut through a squall, “For us.”  
  
“I’m amazed that there’s—that is to say—thank you, Angie,” said Peggy. She hoped that the heat in her cheeks had not made itself too visible; she still had a sense of shame about this somehow, and she was unsure not about Angie but about her own capacity for selflessness in this matter. “Even so I’m not sure I’m right for it,” she said again, and sat with Angie in silence for a while.  
  
“You don’t, I don’t need you to…I’d never make you…”  
  
Peggy extended her own silence for a few more seconds, then said “It’s not what you need me to do or will make me do, Angie.”  
  
“If you think you might want to convert,” said Angie, and the word cut precisely at the joint of Peggy’s self-sufficiency, “I’m not the best person to ask. This is just the way things are for me. It ain’t something I chose and it ain’t something I’m an expert on either.”  
  
“It isn’t about expertise either, whatever expertise may be, but I’m in any case not going to ask anybody about that,” Peggy said. “I don’t believe that’s what I either want or need.”  
  
Something immense within Peggy, immense but not sacred, moved and turned and danced. She saw in her mind’s eye Steve’s warm face beaming. The concept of bullets entered the ambit of her consciousness, and she was sorely tempted to start howling. She imagined taking a brush and painting a line immediately and intimately downwards, from what to what and across what space she was not sure. There was a greenness in the air, a color very close to what her uniform had been. She could barely believe that that time was over. She realized that what she wanted to trust and believe in was that everything could be restored. At twenty-six she had already taken blows and reeled back from them faster and harder and farther than most. She wanted something to exist and stand inviolable, impossible to yank away from being historic. She stood and sat several times in succession, ending up sitting with her hands folded on her crossed knees, gazing at something distant and unavailable. It was something other than the saints and angels. It went further through her than that, and would probably go less far through anybody else.  
  
She knew, and there was a certain unavoidable grimness to knowing this, what it was that she did after all want from Angie. She was—not _ashamed_ to admit, but not thrilled to either—that she had been aware of her tendency towards this from quite a while ago. She had had her suspicions about Bucky, when she’d known him, and they had shared two or three tense conversations in which they had talked distinctively past and over subjects of this kind. She wondered it about a lot of people, really—Steve. Howard. Angie. Wondered and hoped. She hoped for herself also, that there was not something about this to make her otherwise than righteous.  
  
“Righteous” was really a funny, strange, and ambiguous words for her to be using, as somebody with no firm belief or real stake in this part of what Angie and Steve and people like them did. At this point what she could hold out for was that it be something more than a bad joke, at least. And yet she could not be self-pitying about this, or disingenuous.  
  
“Dreams and desires can be hard to know,” she said to Angie without moving her head.  
  
“I’d take my time if I were you,” said Angie.  
  
“You know,” said Peggy, “don’t you, that the people and things that I throw myself into are misfortunate?”  
  
“I know that now,” said Angie. “But we can’t always have peace and quiet. And there’s folks who’d kill for the life you got. You might not think they should but they would.”  
  
“I can’t say it’s a feeling I don’t understand,” said Peggy. It seemed to take Angie a few seconds to parse this.  
  
“I think there’s a lot that we could do for each other,” said Angie, Peggy could swear flirtatiously. “Even if you’re famous and I’m just me.”  
  
“You are most certainly not a person to ‘just’ be,” Peggy said. She realized the cliché but could not really bring herself to care.  
  
They didn’t say much more after that. They agreed that they would go ice skating this Saturday at eleven sharp. Then they went out of the church side by side, and went out into the world again.


End file.
